The Gate's distribution across Selena's network should have ended the conflict, should have reduced the vast entity to negotiable perspectives that could no longer impose transformation through unified will. But cosmic forces rarely surrendered so easily, and the Gate even fractured across hundreds of autonomous points remained what it had always been at its core: a mechanism for transformation, a process rather than merely an entity.
What happened next was something neither Selena nor the Watcher had anticipated. The Gate, unable to function as unified certainty, began to function as something else entirely. It began to breathe.
